No copyright infringement in Linux: claim

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A consultant commissioned to examine the Linux source code by
the SCO Group in 2002 found no evidence of any copyright
infringement, according to an
email which has been posted to the Groklaw website.

SCO filed a
case against IBM in the US in March 2003, claiming breach of
contract. It also claimed Linux was an unauthorised derivative of
UNIX, and warned commercial Linux users that they could be legally
liable for violation of intellectual property.

The email was sent by a SCO senior vice president Reg Broughton
to chief executive Darl McBride and forwarded on an email from a SCO
engineer, Michael Davidson.

Mr Davidson wrote that the examination of the source code had
been undertaken because SCO's executive management refused to
believe that it was possible for Linux and software from the GNU
Project to be written without a little "borrowing" from UNIX.

SCO owned bits of the proprietary UNIX source code and there was
a hope that a "smoking gun" would be found, making it possible for
SCO to increase its earnings through licensing this code.

The examination, undertaken by an outside consultant Bob Swartz,
lasted for four to six months, Mr Davidson said in the email.

The Linux kernel and a large number of libraries and utilities
were examined against several versions of the AT&T UNIX source
code.

Mr Davidson helped the consultant to examine the source
code.

"At the end we found absolutely nothing . . . no evidence of any
copyright infringement whatsoever," Mr Davidson wrote. He said
search had been undertaken for patent infringement, as SCO did not
have the rights to any patents.

"There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and
Linux (all of the X Windows System, for example) but invariably it
turned out that the common code was something both we (SCO) and the
Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party,"
Mr Davidson wrote.

In June 2003, SCO expanded its claims
against IBM to $US3 billion and said it was withdrawing IBM's
licence for its own Unix, AIX.

In July last year, SCO demanded that Linux
users obtain licences for using what it claims to be its own UNIX
code. Later the same year, SCO extended the deadline
for obtaining these licences.